Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Sonal Sinha : Previously, I used to work for website designing and digital marketing company based in New Delhi. It was recession time of 2008-2009, so our project manager had left the job due to nonpayment of dues. The company owner asked me if I can manage the web and SEO projects for the company. Even though I was hesitant, initially, I did agree.
This is where I learned the skills of managing teams and how to deliver the result to the clients. So from sales, I had moved to project management in my second job.
Salaries were often delayed during my time in the company since the recession period was challenging as new projects were concerned. This was when I decided it’s time I started my own company.
I came back to Nagpur and started Shri Krishna Technologies in January 2010. At that time, WordPress as a CMS was very new, and people used it only for blogs. We used to get a lot of projects designing and developing corporate blogs for existing websites. We were also one of the top developers on Elance for WordPress in 2011.
As WordPress grew from a blog site CMS to a complete website CMS and Joomla wasn’t moving faster, we developed our skills more into WordPress, and with more projects under us, we were very comfortable using WordPress for all our projects.
It was easier to manage for clients, and the learning curve was significantly less, so a simple manual was used to do the trick, whereas Joomla took a lot of time for the customer to understand and get under the skin.
Besides SKT Themes (our main website), I own SKT Themes India, which is targeted for Indians only, and Themes21, which is a free WordPress theme website.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by SKT Web Themes Private Limited
Sonal Sinha : Currently, we are focussing on adding more WordPress themes to make the user a more comprehensive selection. We are currently working on a better theme, which I hope will be groundbreaking. We have also started working on plugins. Also we help people all around the world in website development and designing, etc
Great Companies: What makes SKT Web Themes Private Limited different from hundreds of other Web Designing firms ?
Sonal Sinha : Even though we started the theme business in 2013, we started getting recognized from 2014 as we started getting our themes listed in WordPress.org and other places.
Our WordPress themes have all the desired options, but the support we can say is amongst the best. We cater to every client’s requests and guide them through. Even though we were doing a lot of WordPress websites; however, while developing WordPress themes, we were completely new to what a customer can expect from an article. We then checked all the major competitors and their offerings and then understood the bare minimum options.
After that, we added many theme options, thinking about what the customer can ask of apart from what is being offered.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Sonal Sinha : My worst experience to date has to be the 2016 experience when 3 of my employees copied our themes and started their own 2 companies. To date, they continue to copy our old 2016 theme framework and sell their WordPress themes online.
Since then, we have continuously evolved our WordPress themes every year. During 2020 our WordPress themes now entirely page builder friendly and have different theme option customizers than most of our competitors.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for SKT Web Themes Private Limited?
Sonal Sinha : I want WordPress to be both front end and back end editor in the next FIVE years. But the future, as they say, is unpredictable. I am sure the WordPress team has a map laid out in front of them. But you never know if some better CMS pops up in the market, and suddenly WordPress feels the pressure to add those features as well into their CMS.
Currently, I don’t see any competition with WordPress holding above 60% CMS market share and over 38% of all websites done in WordPress.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Sonal Sinha : If you start your own business in WordPress, you should focus more on customer service as the market is quite saturated. Also, many plugins and themes are already free and do an excellent job, so you need to check them and build better tools that attract more clients.
For a start, you should focus on something in your native language and country since the competition will be lower. Then expand to other countries and worldwide. Since I am into theme development, I would say the shelf life of a theme is only two years until people start finding other themes for a website’s fresh design. Hence, if you jump into theme development, you need to continually evolve and add more designs to the latest WordPress trends.
WebSite : https://www.sktthemes.org/